If you use it often, sure. If you don’t smoke and just occasionally need to light fires, get a butane conversion. It’s a replacement for the wick, which pops into the Zippo shell. It doesn’t evaporate over time since it’s sealed.

Yeah, Ryobi had a bad reputation for a long time, because they’re old (dark blue) tools were hot garbage. But when they were bought out by TTI (and they changed the color to the bright green) all the tools started getting made on the same production line as Milwaukee (also owned by TTI). The QA is a little looser on the Ryobi stuff, but it’s all sourced from the same place as the (much more expensive) Milwaukee tools that many people swear by. If I remember correctly, TTI also owns Ridgid.

It’s basically the Lexus/Toyota thing, where they’re both owned and manufactured by the same parent company, but the Lexus brand is much more expensive just because it’s marketed as luxury. You can get a Toyota for half the price of a Lexus, and find the same quality as a Lexus. And for the insanely cheap price and wide range of available tools, it’s hard to go wrong with Ryobi. The Ryobi may not stand up to the same level of abuse as other (more expensive) brands. But the average person isn’t a construction worker using and abusing their tools for 9 hours a day. The average person just needs to occasionally drill a hole in the wall, or cut the occasional piece of lumber. And for that, the Ryobi is the way to go. Hell, even if you’re a hobbyist in the garage, Ryobi will likely be fine for what you need.

Just avoid their larger power tools, like the vacuums and lawn mowers. From what I know, those have a range of issues that haven’t been worked out yet.

Also, it means you can easily repair/modify the hardware for whatever reason you might come up with.

The ironic part is that you’d need a second soldering iron to do that.

If you’re a musician or audio tech trying to get started, the Shure SM58 and SM57 are the first two mics you should grab. 58 for vocals, and 57 for anything that doesn’t need a screen (like an instrument or guitar amp.) Both have the exact same mic capsule, but the 58 has a larger filter that will make it a little warmer and less prone to popping on plosives.

Are there fancier mics out there that sound better, or are made for specific purposes? Yeah. But there’s diminishing returns on audio quality, you can’t use them for as many things, and more sensitive mics are also more fragile. For $100 each, you can get some mics that will be passed down to your grandchildren. If you’re trying to cover the widest possible range of uses, the 58 and 57 are your go-to mics.

Whenever you think of a stereotypical 🎤 microphone, you’re 100% thinking of a Shure SM58.

I use an Altoids tin for my first aid kid, for similar reasons. The damned things are basically indestructible as long as you’re not going out of your way to crush them. The one in my pocket right now is probably 5 or 6 years old. I prefer the smaller form factor, because I typically only pack for a few blisters or scrapes; Anything larger would be referred to the full first aid kit in my car.

The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.

Amazon is increasingly hostile with Calibre, especially within the past year or two. Things like intentionally destroying included book covers/thumbnails for books uploaded by Calibre, intentionally breaking Collection editing via Calibre so you have to do it on the Kindle directly, and not allowing users to download their Amazon-purchased books into Calibre.

Worth noting that the one exception for every e-reader is the screen. E-ink screens are very sensitive to pressure, and can be damaged internally even if the surface is totally fine. It’s not something that any one model will do better or worse, because it’s simply due to the way e-ink screens work. Fixing the issue would require inventing new e-ink tech.

Get a folio cover, with a hard/stiff fold. This will more evenly spread any pressure out across the entire screen, ensuring that no damage happens to the underlying e-ink. Nothing worse than pulling your e-reader out of your bag and discovering that it was resting up against something pointy while you walked around, and is now damaged.

That being said, the Kobo’s waterproofing is no joke. I take mine when I go camping, because I’m not worried about it getting wet at all. I could read in the middle of a monsoon, and it would be totally fine.

Yeah, I love everything about my Kindle except for the fact that it’s tied to Amazon. Calibre goes a long way in bridging the gap, (I have a fairly large personal library that isn’t tied to Amazon), but it’s no replacement for native support. If you plan on using Calibre, you should seriously consider a Kobo.

I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”

Harris currently has like 64M votes. This same time 4 years ago, Biden had +80M.Democrat voters didn’t fucking show up.

Almost as if running a centrist platform to try to pick up republican votes was a bad idea, and only disheartened democrat voters. Only 4% of registered republicans voted for Harris, the same as Biden. Hopefully democrats learned something from this, but that’s doubtful.

Yup exactly this. Republicans tend to vote early and be in areas that get counted faster; It’s easier to count 1000 rural votes than it is to count 10000 urban votes. So he’ll take the early numbers and declare victory, then send it all the way to the SCOTUS when the blue votes begin to catch up. And (unless something drastically shifts and there is a major upset in the court) the SCOTUS will hand it to him.

Unless you’re designing the speakers’ circuitry, testing mic element response curves, designing the mic housing, etc, you’re not an engineer. You’re just a technician. This is like saying IT Help Desk is staffed by software engineers. They may have one or two actual engineers available, but you’re definitely not going to be talking to them for the daily “I don’t know the difference between rebooting and turning my monitor off and back on again” issues. IT Help Desk has techs who deal with the actual operation.

The only boots-on-the-ground position that might qualify for an actual engineering title would be the system designer, who did the math (or at least plugged all the numbers into their program) to determine where/how to set up the line arrays for adequate and even coverage throughout the room. At least they dip their toes into acousticians’ territory, so they may qualify as an engineer if you stretch the definition a little bit.

Source: Am an audio tech; Not an engineer.

I also have issues with the fact that staging refers to lighting electricians as… Well… Electricians. In other industries, an electrician will have a journeyman’s license at least. They’ll have several years of experience under their belt, and will have done a full apprenticeship under a master electrician. But in staging, an electrician is just someone who plugs lights in.

Here’s a harsh reminder that Trump is farther ahead in the polls than he was with Hillary at this same point in the election. The polls showed a landslide win for Hillary by this point, but that obviously didn’t happen. Now the polls show a much closer race for Kamala, which means (if the same thing happens again) then Trump has a very real shot at winning again.

Though to be fair, it looks like Kamala has learned from Hillary, and avoided the “we’ve got this, no problem, don’t even worry about it” attitude that Hillary had early on in the race. Hillary wanted to exude an air of confidence early on, like she had been working towards the presidential race for decades. That ended up being her downfall, because it meant a lot of democrats just fucking stayed home. Because if the person is saying not to worry about it, why do I need to bother voting? The issue is that when every person told themselves that same thing, it meant Hillary lost a lot of votes due to apathy. If you go back and look at her campaign, there was a very drastic shift in Hillary’s messaging a month or two before Election Day, when her team realized that democrat voters had become apathetic. It suddenly shifted from “we’ve got this” to “oh holy fuck please fucking please vote”

That’s likely why they said “while you still can”, but yeah.

Also because several ballot drop boxes in liberal areas have been set on fire.

Yup, if Trump wins and starts enacting fascist policies, I’ll 100% be defaulting to “oh who has time for politics” when anyone asks what my views are. Because I’ll have to assume that if someone is asking, it’s to report me if I’m too liberal. It’s always important to remember that the nazi camps didn’t start with Jews; It started with political prisoners and dissenters who spoke out against the government. Because when a fascist government is seizing control, the first thing they’ll do is try to silence the opposition.

Tankie is a sort of derogatory term for people who whitewash and cover up the horrors of communism.

There was a rebellion in the Soviet Union. The SU responded by rolling tanks into town and violently busting it. This put two sides of communism at odds; On one hand, there was the plight of the working class (the rebellion) and then on the other there were the actions of the people in control (the tanks). Tankies are the “communism has only ever helped people, you’re just listening to capitalist propaganda” folks who decided to side with the tanks, instead of siding with the working class. It’s sort of like calling someone a fake communist, [insert “No True Scotsman fallacy” argument from a tankie below], because a “real” communist would side with the working class.

You see it a lot on Lemmy because many instances have some major communist lean. After all, the “anyone can run their own instance and be in charge. No centralized instances, if you don’t like the mods you can just change instances” concept of the Fediverse jives very well with communist ideals. For instance, the “ml” in lemmy.ml is meant to stand for “Maoist/Leninist”. And that means the entire communist spectrum is on display; From both the more moderate “yeah communism has some cool parts but was also responsible for some major humanitarian crises” to the more extreme “those crises [were caused by individuals, not by the political system]/[never actually happened at all. They’re lies made up by capitalists to deter people from supporting communism!] Communism never actually hurt anyone.”

The system has been moving intentionally hamstrung at every opportunity by judges he picked during his first term, to give him a chance to be reelected before he is sentenced during those 4 years.

It has been maddening watching Teflon Trump dodge and evade sentencing, by blatantly cheating the system using pawns he installed.

Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.

Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.

But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.